[Taxacom] More vindication for Croizat

[John Grehan]

One of the major implications of panbiogeography is that earth and life
evolve together. This has been demonstrated innumerable times within the
research program, but often there are papers that touch on the same themes
and independently come to the same or similar conclusions. An example of
this is a recent paper in J Biogeography where the authors "... propose the
hypothesis that the legacy of Miocene marine incursions in the region
explains the present-day occurrence, in western Amazonia, of plant species
found in coastal and/or estuarine zones" and "We hypothesize that coastal
plants dispersed along the shores of this embayment and persisted as inland
relicts after the marine incursion(s) retreated." This is all pretty much
pure panbiogeography in concept and a nice corroboration of a major theme
developed in panbiogeography.

The authors note that "Extant plants with a disjunct coastal and inland
distribution and different ecologies (coastal, estuarine or both) may
provide a previously unexplored data source to address the influence of
historical landscape changes on the assembly of current ecosystems."
Presumably in regarding these patterns as a previously unexplored data
source they were not so attuned to the panbiogeographic literature where
the concept and examples are widely explored, but hopefully they will be
now. One does not have to be a panbiogeographer to recognize this
historical process and nice to see further evidence that about such things
Croizat did get it right..

Citation and link to open access pdf below

John Grehan

Bernal R, Bacon CD, Balslev H, et al. Could coastal plants in western
Amazonia be relicts of past
marine incursions?. J Biogeogr. 2019;46:1749–1759.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.13560